THE HISTORY OF THE REALIST NOVEL is paradoxical: it is the history of a literary system that spans the globe and yet consists of distinctly local performances. While intent on describing “everyday occurrences . . . accurately and profoundly set in a definite period of contemporary history” (these are Erich Auerbach’s words), the novel, more than any other literary genre, has demonstrated a remarkable formal portability, traveling virtually intact across cultures and languages and beyond historical circumstance. Students of the novel will readily grant these “historical” facts, but there is less consensus regarding the question of how exactly the novel is able to perform these seemingly incompatible protocols. How can the novel be at once local, insular, even provincial, and yet worldly, universal, global? To what extent can the novel’s representational specificity account for its verifiably global character?

Traditionally—and arguably this is still the dominant model today—the age-old distinction between form and content has been deployed to account for the double duty performed by the novel. According to this model, the novel’s loose, though fairly stable, formal traits—character-centered story-telling, “thick” description, narrative focalization, standard plots, recurrent stylistic devices, the past as primary verbal tense, and so on—make it particularly well suited to the task of representing, in however mediated and complex a form, widely varying local environments without significant loss of structural integrity. In a familiar projection of this account, national literatures are defined by the particular content they bring to bear on a ready-made form generically marked by the experience of the nation; the novel then becomes, by implication, a world literary form that can be transposed from one nation to another even as the transposition itself registers the existence (or marks the emergence) of a recognizably modern form of political and social organization. The seeming discontinuity obtaining between the specificity found in national literatures and the universality of a single Weltliteratur is thus neatly resolved by positing the singularity of local content against the generality of a plurivalent global form.

Before proposing a different set of terms for reading the novel in the age of globalization, I want to consider this tendency with reference to two texts that are informed by, and have in turn informed, developments and debates in recent critical genealogies of the novel. Both Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983; revised 1991), a text whose influence in the cultural study of the novel has been widely felt for better than a decade, and Franco Moretti’s Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900 (1998), a more recent but no less important contribution to the sociological study of the novel, give compelling reasons for considering the nineteenth-century novel as a powerful vehicle of cultural self-representation by means of which the modern nation state could be symbolically grasped by its citizens. In their accounts a specific national reality circumscribed by spatial and temporal modalities newly within reach of individual human experience finds a successful representational vehicle in the spatial and temporal coordinates charted by the traditional novel. Differences of emphasis and of disciplinary approach (Anderson is a social scientist, Moretti a literary historian) mark their otherwise complementary arguments: while Anderson may be said to novelize the nation, Moretti attempts to nationalize the novel.